Hello all.
I haven't play tested the vigilante and I'm not going to. But I didn't come here to speak badly about it either. I came here to make a suggestion.
First off: the general consensus seems to be that the vigilante isn't a very good class. It takes too long to be able to change between social mode and effective mode, either in the time it actually takes, or in the levels one needs to acquire before being able to do it fast enough. And when you finally have the level to change in a fair time, the abilities are simply too far behind everyone else to matter much in the bigger picture.
The idea: Looking at the vigilante made me think of the old 3.5 prestige class "the cameleon." This class could shift between being an arcane caster, a divine caster, a semi-warrior or a semi-rogue.
At the early levels, you could change your "focus" once per day and as you leveled you could do it more often. As you leveled, you where also able to apply class abilities, such as smite, rage and trapfinding and at level 7 (out of 10) you could have 2 foci up at the same time.
Building the concept into a 20 levels class seems to me to be an interesting possibility, especially with the talents of the vigilante, as they could be made into a general pool that supports a specific focus.
This would mean that you would have to spend your talents on one, or at the most two foci, to be able to keep up with the rest of your party, but when you really need another healer, or a trapfinder, or a backup martial, you can shift over and hold that position, at least acceptably.
Making a "social focus" would give the Vigilante the ability to shift into a social persona and still being capable within that focus instead of losing most of his abilities.
Sending the Vigilante in this direction would make a spy more than a super hero, but since the book is called "ultimate intrigue" and not "ultimate avengers," I think that would be acceptable.
On a personal note: Having read through a bunch of the threads about the Vigilante I think that it would be healthier for the class in general if the developers accepted that most people who take a look at it hates it and finds it useless compared to other classes.
The current trend with stubbornly claiming that it is a good class and not acknowledging the feedback, even if it is mostly "armchair" will probably come back and bite them in the backside if they publish the class the way they seem to envision it.
Also the name ... The Vigilante was a not-very-interesting prestige class in 3.5, making it a not-very-interesting base class in Pathfinder, just because superheroes is the new black, doesn't seem a very good idea :)
Funny. I never really liked the factotum. The way it picked up abilities on the fly was kinda cool, it just seemed too different from the "normal" way things was done in D&D for my tastes.
What was so attractive about the cameleon, at least for me, was that I had to pick my focus for a longer period and even at higher levels I had to consider it carefully before I changed it to something else as I could hardly afford to be caught in a "mode" that my feats didn't support.